GEOS managed to offer nearly all the functionality of the original Mac in a 1 MHz computer with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. It wasn't an OS written to run on a generic x86 chip on a moving hardware platform. It was written using immense knowledge of the hardware and the tricks one could use to maximise speed. Note:After a small break, here is another one of the articles for the Alternative OS contest.

Great article. I remember running Geoworks Ensemble which came packaged with my Laser 286 computer; it was excellent; I took it to college with me and used the word processor a lot.

The great thing about Geoworks was it had some great print technology, such that my Radio Shack dmp-105 could do very nice wysiwyg with it. It did this by making several passes over the page. It took forever, but looked great. No small feat for the dmp-105, which was a _7_ pin dot matrix printer.

Back in the late 80s I was in college, and when my Okidata printer would turned great wysiwyg text, one professor asked me how I was managing to get so much quality into my papers. GEOS was my silver bullet. I also remember clacking away at monochrome DOS in the basic comp-sci. class I was taking and laughing all the way back to my dorm to my full-color stereo graphic OS C-64. I knew that I was being taught the past, and getting to play with the future.